Eberron: The Rising Mists
by OKShark
Summary: Set in Eberron, this is the story of a handful of brave Cyran sailors as their shore leave is interrupted by the worst tragedy in history.  Only some will survive the Day of Mourning.  Rated T for swearing, violence, and implied sexual situations.
1. Prologue and Explanation

Prologue and Explanation:

Author's Note: I added a short summary of Eberron for readers who aren't familiar with Dungeons and Dragons' newest campaign world.

Eberron is a world in which magic has been tamed and advanced to the point of replacing technology. Magewrights work tirelessly at powerful creation forges, turning out everburning lamps, healing draughts, and even the Warforged: golem-soldiers made of living stone and metal. The continent of Khorvaire, the main continent of Eberron, is criss-crossed with railroad tracks on which fantastic, elementally-fuelled Lightning Rails carry goods and passengers all over the world. An information network made up of crystal balls and whisper-stones allows for the free flow of news and stories across the world, and there is even an international newspaper: the Korranberg Chronicles. In the last few years the inventors of House Cannith have even discovered how to build grand flying airships.

Eberron is also a world at war. Civil war has gripped the grand empire of Galifor for nearly a century, splitting it into five lesser nations and numerous splinter territories. Generations have been born and died knowing only war, and many fear that if peace does not come soon, it may destroy the continent. The people of Khorvaire, sickened at the thought of sending any more of their brave boys and girls into the grinder, have lately started replacing their human troops with Warforged golems. The living constructs are little more than slaves, fighting and dying loyally for any faction that can afford them.

The five nations of Eberron are:

**Aundair**: a haughty nation famed for its arcane libraries and ample farmland. Aundair has used the war to settle a longstanding grudge with Thrane and Breland.

**Breland**: a cosmopolitan, democratic country whose economy is based on trade and manufacturing. The Brelish navy is larger than most and, until recently, they supplemented their forces with goblinoid mercenaries and monsters.

**Cyre**: the center of art, fashion, and invention for much of Khorvaire. Also literally the center of Khorvaire, Cyre, surrounded on all sides by enemies, has suffered the worst under the war. Only their technological edge - including masses of Warforged infantry - and a core of seasoned veterans has allowed them to survive.

**Karrnath**: a cold, regimented country with a historic tradition of military conquest. Karrnath is a land of dark secrets and strong fortresses. In Karrnath, even the dead defend the fatherland, and the ranks of the Karrnathi infantry are supplemented by skeletons, zombies, and other undead warriors.

**Thrane**: The holy land of Thrane is the home of Eberron's newest religion, the Silver Flame. At their capital of Flamekeep, a divine pillar of holy fire makes its commandments known to worshipful apostles by possessing the body of a young girl, the Keeper of the Flame. Thranes fight with discipline and bravery, faithfully defending not only their nation but their god.

Additionally, Khorvaire is home to the Dragonmarked Houses: powerful international guilds that have used ingenuity and magic to gain a virtual monopoly in their fields of expertise. House Cannith, for instance, is the last word in the creation of magical weapons and vehicles. House Orien controls the powerful Lightning Rails that allow passengers to cross the continent in a matter of days. House Phiarlan is holds sway in the field of entertainment (and espionage, but few know that), House Deneith provides bodyguards, House Sivis relays messages magically, House Lyrandar runs elementally powered ships and airships, etc. The guilds have a policy of strict neutrality towards all sides in the war.

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Prologue

There was no lack of forewarning before the Day of Mourning. For months beforehand, prophets and holy man had experienced blinding headaches and strange dreams. In the fields of Aundair an entire herd of cattle gave birth to two headed offspring: in the desolate sandy wastes of Droaam, the horrific she-hag Tal Nandrosaa'k gave birth to a perfect and clean limbed human child. Two weeks before the Day, the silver dragon Irshandra, whilst drowsing on a slab of uncut granite within his mountain observatory, observed a curious conjunction of the Rings of Siberys with the moons Threnedor and Barrakas, denoting some unspeakable tragedy was likely to occur within the month. He made a note of it in his journals, but did not think to warn any mortals. In a dimly lit crypt beneath the city of Sharn a thousand apostles of the Keeper, god of death, gathered together to drink from a bowl full powerful poison.

They wanted to avoid the rush.


	2. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Neana Tacey shouldered through the swinging double doors and into a wall of noise and light. The main room of the Guard's Rest was packed tonight, filled past capacity with rowdy sailors. The crowd around the bar was thick and disorderly with men jostling one another to gain the attention of the inn's one barkeep. A dozen people waved to her as she came in, but she barely inclined her head in recognition. She had bigger fish to gut.

It took her five minutes to locate a serving girl – Janis, she thought her name was; the freckled one with the breasts – and another five minutes to get her attention. Not for the first time in her life Neana wished she could make her voice loud enough to be heard above the crowd – above any crowd – but a _Valaes Tairn_ knife had ruined any chance of that decades ago. The best she could manage on most days was a raspy whisper. Neana absentmindedly stroked the ring of scar tissue that encircled her throat as she pushed her way through the crowd. She reached Janis in the center of a knot of sailors and grabbed the waitress's arm with one steel-gauntled fist. Janis squeaked, and cringed away from her.

Idiot.

"Hot water," Neana whispered. "Bath."

"Err... yes, ma'am." She gave Neana a fearful look. "Right away, ma'am."

"Thank you," Neana croaked, but Janis had already fled. Stupid girl. There were much more frightening things in this world than a hoarse voice.

With that taken care of, she had a little time to spare. The Guard's Rest was only a moderate-sized inn, built to succor the sailors of Seaside in between voyages, but it knew how to please its customers. It boasted a common room twice the size of anyone else in town, with long tables and benches to seat hungry sailors, and it also had plenty of shadowy corner booths to conduct illicit business in. Seaside, like every major settlement along Kraken Bay, was a smuggler's haven first and foremost; that meant wine, women, and gambling. The air was full of the smell of roasted meat and pipe smoke, a sickly sweet combination. With her pointed ears, she picked out the clatter of dozens of dice hitting tabletops, and the disappointed groans of sailors saying goodbye to their hard earned pay. Neana might only be half an elf, but she had damn good hearing.

Neither food nor drink nor women appealed to Neana at the moment; nothing did, except ridding her skin of a month's worth of dirt and crusted sea salt. She headed for the least crowded corner of the bar, to kill time until her bath was drawn, and found what she was looking for immediately; officers. There were nearly a dozen of them, the command watch of two heavy dromonds. They had scooted together a pair of tables and dealt out three packs of cards; a game of Knights and Dragons, it looked like. In the far corner a tall, stern-looking man with chocolate-colored skin was playing a game of Conquerer against a thin, tanned woman with sandy blonde hair. The two were bent over the worn wooden board with bowed heads, contemplating the game pieces while they both gossiped like old maids. The man was the captain of the ship Mother Bear, and the woman was Alexia ir'Arth, the captain of the Dire Kitten and Neana's immediate superior.

At the card table a tall female Kalashtar with violet eyes pulled out a chair for Neana. "Lieutenant Tacey: sit," Chandrasitar said. "I'll deal you in."

That was shocking. Chandra may have been one of Neana's shipmates, but she hardly ever spoke to anyone, and had never made any friendly overtures before. Usually the beautiful bronze-skinned woman held herself totally aloof from the rest of the crew, preferring to spend her time in meditation or contemplating the sheaf of maps she kept locked in a great waterproof tube in her cabin. The friendly offer was so unexpected that Neana, though she didn't really care for card games, started to sit down automatically.

Then the Kalashtar reached into her mind.

There are no words adequate to describe the feeling of someone else's thoughts worming their way into your brain, but Neana instinctively knew that 'worming' was in the right direction; it felt like having slimy leeches press and writhe and squirm across the skin of her forehead. In a way that she couldn't understand, something alien and cold was probing through her skull. Words appeared, in Chandra's voice, without bothering to pass through Neana's ears. _"Wonderful! These fools are dancing at the chance to part with their money. The half-orc alone has more tells than I have fingers! I only need a partner to collude with, to begin taking their money in earnest. Join me and we'll draw a month's pay each before the night is over. We can coordinate our hands without anyone ever knowing."_

Neana winced, and shook her head. _"Don't do that!"_ she thought back, as hard as she could. "_Stop!_"

Chandra blinked and the feeling of having tendrils pressed against her head subsided, but not completely. _"I apologize. I sometimes forget that others find mental communication uncomfortable. I will not repeat my mistake."_ Chandra inclined her head a quarter inch, the smallest and most circumspect bow her culture recognized Out loud she said, "Lieutenant? Would you like me to deal you a hand?"

"No," Neana croaked. Her head was still reeling, and she pressed a fist to her temples. Smug psychic bitch. She shoved the proffered chair back with a kick and walked away from the table.

She was overreacting to the mind touch, she knew, but it had been so... Cold. Invasive. Alien. You heard about telepathy, and you assumed that it was just like speaking, only not out loud, but that had been a whole other order of sensation altogether. Perhaps it merely mirrored the nature of the initiator's thoughts, perhaps the probe had felt cold and alien because Chandra was a cold and alien woman. It would go a long way towards explaining why Neana and Chandrasitar had never gotten along. Not that Neana got along with much of anyone; she could number her friends on one hand.

She stomped towards the inn's bath room, located under the kitchen. Though the bar was crowded, people made way for her instantly. Neana may have been a half-elf, and a short half-elf at that, but what she lacked in height and weight she made up for with bulky armor and a four foot long curved blade strapped to her back.

She was the First Sword on the Dire Kitten, the highest ranked man – or woman, as it were – at-arms. The First Sword was in charge of all the marines, just as the First Bow was in charge of all the archers. She answered only to Captain ir'Arth, and half the men upstairs would jump to attention instinctively if she snapped her fingers. Her superiors had told her once that you would never rise to command: that you can't be an effective bully sergeant if you couldn't raise your voice above a raspy whisper. They were wrong. You could, if you were hateful enough. Neana had just spent two tireless and miserable months whipping sullen recalcitrant pirates and vagabonds – with the way the war was going these days, the Cyran navy was lucky to get those dregs – into a trained crew of boarding marines, and she was exhausted with it. To top it all off, because she had come straight from the ship, after making sure that all her soldiers had stowed away their gear, she was still wearing her armor and blade of office. And more than anything in the world right now she wanted to tear it all off and soak in a steaming tub.

A crude wooden sign hanging from the latch to the bath room read "Ocupied", but when she tested the door, Neana found that it was open. Janis must be filling the tub, she thought. Inside, instead of the barmaid, she discovered a pink skinned and very freshly scrubbed young sailor struggling to put his pants on. It was one of her soldiers. He blushed a roaring shade of red and dropped his drawers: one hand tried to salute, the other tried to cover up his man parts. Neither attempt was very successful.

"Ma'am!"

"Don't mind me, sailor." Neana stripped her gauntlets off and walked past him. The wall was divided up into cubby holes, and she began peeling off pieces of her armor and stowing them. Gloves first – she needed her fingertips free to work some of the tiny clasps – then pauldrons, then belt. With great care and reverence she stripped off her baldric, and laid the long, ornate falchion _Sharneth_ aside: the sword was twice her age, over a century old, and it had seen the beginning of the Last War. With luck, it would see the end of it. In the flickering light of the cellar's candelabra, it shed its own magical illumination, lending a dim blue glow to the cubby-hole she stored it in. With that out of the way, Neana could finally pry herself out of the heavy breastplate. She breathed a sigh of relief as the weight left her shoulders and the bones in her spine popped back into place. They said it was an alloy of mithral and steel, they promised you that it weighed practically nothing compared to full armor, but you try wearing it for eight hours and see how heavy "practically nothing" feels. Free of the confines of her metal cage, Neana discovered that her whole damn body itched. It took her a minute's worth of desperate tugging to pull off her quilted wool gambeson, the heavy padded jacket that kept her breastplate from chafing more than it already did, but she finally managed to expose enough of her skin to the open air to get at the itches. She scratched vigorously beneath the woolen shift, leaving shallow red welts: the pain was still less aggravating than the itching.

"Damn, that feels good."

As she was scratching she heard a strange sound. She looked up. The soldier – Paulo, she finally remembered: young kid, just getting back from his first voyage – was covering his eyes and whimpering. He was having some trouble getting his pants on: Neana noticed that although he was no longer saluting, part of him was still trying to stand at attention. It took a few seconds to break through her exhaustion-addled brain, but Neana finally put two and two together long enough to be embarrassed. Just because she had no interest in men didn't mean that men had no interest in her. Biting her lip to keep from chuckling, she donned her gambeson again. "You can open your eyes now."

"That's okay, ma'am. With respect, I think I'll leave them closed."

"Sorry, sailor. My fault. It's just, on the ship," she tried to explain, "I get used to thinking of myself as one of the boys..."

"Ma'am." Still red as a beet, he furiously tucked all offending parts inside his pants, before stumbling towards the door. She watched him slam it as he left. It was kind of sweet, really. Most of the men under her command would have been leering, trying to memorize every detail. She heard the stories they told about her, when they thought she wasn't listening. Pointed ears had their uses. Why were men so fascinated by the idea of two women...? Forget it.

Neana made sure to close the door before peeling off her greaves, boots, and breeches. She studied the steaming bath tub, anticipating an hour's worth of quiet relaxation. The tubs were the Guard's Rest's pride and joy, imported straight from Sharn. They were magical; somehow, they kept the water inside them perpetually steamy and hot, with no fire or furnace. There were three of them, each in its own little room, with hooks holding fresh towels, big blocks of caustic white soap, and fresh sea sponges to scrape off the grime of a long ocean voyage. Gingerly, Neana lowered herself into a tub and Sighed happily as she sank into the scalding water inch by inch.

Content to float, Neana laid her head back and decided to let the heat work the kinks out of her tired muscles. The water felt so good, and she was so very tired.


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Neana watched the ballista bolt fall harmlessly into the ship's wake, a good three yards off target. The other ship was coming up fast on the Dire Kitten's stern, and wouldn't have time to crank back the winch mechanism for another. That meant it was sword time. Neana unsheathed _Sharneth_, and laid the edge against the ship's railing.

She glanced behind her, taking the measure of her crew. There were twenty marines – two full squads – in leather armor with wooden shields and short swords, waiting for her command. Three were veterans, thirteen were raw recruits that she had done her best to make into warriors, and the other four were pressganged pirates: criminals sentenced for their crimes to serve their country in time of war. She had placed them in the front row, so that they couldn't stab any of the others in the back. They'd likely die in the initial charge, and rid Neana of two problems at once. Behind them, a dozen archers were waiting for the enemy ship to draw within view. That wasn't any of Neana's concern; Lt. Katra Vandeen was the ship's First Bow. Behind them, on the ship's tall and fortified sterncastle, stood Captain ir'Arth in her gleaming silvered plate armor. The tranquil, middle-aged woman gripped her wheel with sanctity and composure that Neana envied: if there had been a painter on deck to capture the way the light glinted off her pauldron, he could have spawned a whole new flurry of enlistment posters.

With a stern salute Captain ir'Arth gave command of the ship's marines to Neana. Behind her, on the edge of the horizon, a fleet of fat merchant ships waited nervously on the outcome of the battle. Their holds were loaded with base metals and luxury goods destined for Metros and the war effort; but first they had to make it into Kraken Bay.

Chandrasitar had spotted the Valenar ship this morning. No one had expected to encounter the hated elves this far west. They must have gotten wind of the merchant fleet. Technically the traders may have been neutral in terms of the war, but Valenar, who claimed tariff and cargo-right over all the southern seas, wanted their own cut.

Fuck them.

Neana judged the Valenar ship to be close enough when she could make out the sound of its battlesingers. She recognized the tune: in a plaintive chant the elven singers demanded that their enemies die quickly and with honor. The Valenar always had to make a show of every little thing. Neana gave the order, flexing her fingers in the simple hand-signs that she had spent weeks drilling into her men: _"Follow me when you can."_ She watched the Valenar ship come into view, a sleek windrunner with a narrow keel and trim rigging. A raiding ship. She was faster than the Dire Kitten, but nowhere near as sturdy, and she couldn't carry as large a compliment of fighters. On the other hand, every one of their soldiers would be Valenar; arrogant cocksuckers one and all, but nearly unmatched in battle.

Nearly.

The enemy ship drew closer, coming in at an angle, readying to throw grapples. When the elves drew close enough, they loosed arrows, but most of their quarrels became harmlessly tangled in the Kitten's sails, or thudded into the shields of her men, who instinctively formed a wall around the archers. She heard a scream, somewhere to her left: a lucky shot or a careless marine. When the last arrow finally fell, she decided that it was time to do her trick. She weaved her fingers, feeling the complex, invisible threads of magic even through her steel gauntlets, and muttered a simple arcane phrase. Feeling the magic begin to flow through her, she took _Sharneth_ up in both hands, took two huge strides to build up momentum, and jumped.

"Heads up, you bastards."

Neana heard the sound of splintering wood behind her, and knew that Captain ir'Arth would chew her out for that; the force of her magically imbued leap had hammered a hole in the foredeck. It was worth it though, if it let her cross the sixty feet between the two ships before the elves had time to prepare themselves. For a split second, as she was hanging in empty air fifteen feet above their heads, she had time to memorize the look of stupid shock on every single skinny face; two dozen sailors, fifteen fighters, ten archers, and one captain wearing a really lovely set of ornamental armor and carrying a silver-filigreed double bladed sword. _He's mine_, she thought, and then she crashed into the deck.

The first elf was still raising her sword – a beautiful antique scimitar or Aereni origins, if Neana was any judge of steel – when Neana took her head off. A second elf's entrails hit the deck as Neana completed _Sharneth_'s deadly arc. That was all she had time for. The Valenar may have been surprised, but they were still seasoned warriors. The battle began in earnest.

They tried to surround her, but Neana had her back to the railing. The four elves in front of her attacked, and scored numerous glancing blows, but Neana's armor was tough and not a little bit magical, the product of House Cannith's better forgewright homunculi. One elf, who overextended his sword as he made a stabbing thrust, lost his arm at the elbow to Neana's counterattack. As he fell back, screaming, another soldier stepped over him to take his place. Neana did her best to keep a whirling wall of steel between her and her attackers, but it was quickly turning into a chaotic free-for-all, and she knew that she couldn't last forever against these odds. Suddenly she felt a screeching pain along her right arm, and knew that someone's blade had found a weak seem in her chain sleeves.

She decided to get serious.

Each of the Valenar knew how to use a sword competently, from the King of their nation to the smallest, meanest Valenar stable boy. Even before they learned how to read, they learned the dance of blades. Well, damnit, so had she, even if her teachers hadn't been as grand or noble as theirs. But Neana had an edge; she hadn't just studied swordplay, but magic as well. She'd been apprenticed at Metrol's great magical academies for nearly a decade, learning to harness the arcane forces that underlay the natural world.

These elves knew how to kill with steel. She could kill with a word.

The wound on her arm was bleeding badly, and Neana could see that blood had already trickled down her arm and coated her hand a dark crimson. She caught the Valenar by surprise when she lowered her guard, drawing her blade back and down, letting the flow of blood coat _Sharneth's_ curved edge. Fearing a feint, they didn't press the attack immediately, and that was their downfall. With a single word Neana transmuted the blood to fire, wreathing her falchion into a blazing inferno. She thrust it through the nearest elf's chest, the rings of his fancy chain shirt flowing like wax around the heat of her sword. It passed through him so cleanly and easily that she pressed the attack, skewering the unwitting soldier behind him on four feet of curved steel, before jerking it free with a quick, smooth cut that nearly bisected both elves at the waist. The Valenar watched in shock as two of their number crumpled limply to the ground. _Sharneth_, no longer ignited, hissed and popped in its coating of steaming elf blood.

Neana giggled, and raised her sword in a mockery of the _Valaes Tairn_ battlefield salute.

When she was a girl, Neana had lived on a farm on the border of Karnath and Cyre. Like her parents, and like many people in her village, she was a Khorovar: part human, part elf. When she was nine, Valenaran mercenaries had been spotted near her village; a foraging detail. The irony was, if the villagers hadn't decided to put up a fight, they elves probably would have stolen a little food and moved on. But her village tried to defend their crops, and by the Valenar code of honor, that made it a fight to the death. The elven warriors felt no kinship with their half-blood kin. They had killed her parents in front of her, and then slit her own throat, probably out of a sense of mercy. The _Valaes Tairn_ valued ancestry above all else, and to them being orphaned, growing up not knowing which ancestor spirits to venerate, was probably a terrible and shameful thing. Neana had lived, barely, and now she hated all Valenar with a blind and burning passion, and that was right and correct. Her hate made the world make sense, and kept her warm at night. She had joined the Cyran military because it gave her an opportunity and a justification to kill elves, and it was a decision she had never regretted.

Neana had aged as a human until she reached puberty, and then her aging had slowed to a crawl. She was forty seven, and looked to be in her early twenties, in human terms. That was the nature of Half-elves. Unlike Khorovar, the Valenar took decades to reach maturity. Each of the elves she faced was well over one hundred years old, and probably half a century of that had been spent studying the art of war. At times like this, Neana liked to remind herself of the fact that she had learned more of killing in two decades then these jokers would in a millennium. She glanced around the blood soaked deck and giggled again; six hundred years of irreplaceable elven history now coating the deck in sanguine gore.

Hate was a valuable thing.

A flight of arrows fell in front of her, thudding relentlessly into the back row of Valenar archers. At her back, Neana heard the cheers of lusty Cyran marines, and knew that she had bought enough time. The Dire Kitten was pulling up alongside the elven ship, and the Valenaran defenders were in disarray. She heard Captain ir'Arth give the order to affix grapples. Her men could handle the rest.

Time to move.

With another word of power a pair of ghostly spectral wings erupted from her back, bat-like and translucent and barely visible in the bright noon light. With a quick, forceful flap she threw herself into the air again, sailing neatly over the heads of the elven soldiers. Behind her, marines poured into the gap she had left for them. She deftly road the air currents and touched down on the ship's sterncastle just as the wings' magic faded and they disappeared. Across the broad curve of the stern, the elven captain eyed her warily. She knew enough about Valenar military customs to mark him as a veteran; his two-bladed sword – like two scimitar blades joined hilt to hilt – was worked with silver leafwork, and each plate of his elaborate coat of armor had been worked to resemble a shining steel oak leaf.

"Mine," she croaked, in elven.

"Die well," he replied. With a certain wry irony he saluted her, and charged.

He was fast: shockingly fast. She barely had time to raise _Sharneth_ and turn a killing blow into a shallow cut along her thigh. Neana curled her hand into a fist, drawing the essence of fire from the scorched summer air. With a wave she launched a globe of burning light at him, briefly wreathing his face in flames that hurt him only a little but distracted him long enough for her to draw a shallow cut along his abdomen. He had the temerity to laugh! From some ungodly reserve he found the strength to move even faster: his double scimitar became a whirling wheel of death. Neana had no chance to follow its movements, and it was everything she could do to parry the worst of his attacks, only taking a dozen minor wounds instead of one mortal one. She marshaled her will and shouted another arcane word at him: his feet froze to the decks, held in chains of spectral force that sprang forth from the ancient planks.

She threw herself back against the railing, and tried to formulate a plan. Neana was bleeding like a sieve. The Elven captain showed no signs of slowing down, and spun his blade through several deadly defensive forms as he waited patiently for the magical chains to fade. Neana only had one trick left, but it was a great one. As the translucent chains collapsed back into the nothing they were made from, he charged her. In three quick strides he closed the distance; his feet barely touched the deck. At the last second Neana shouted a word: as it left her mouth it became a wave of hardened wind that deflected his overhand blow away from her neck and sent his sword cleaving through the oak railing.

Gently, ever so gently, she laid a hand on his shoulder. She whispered a word. The elven captain winked out of existence, leaving his sword embedded in the wood of his ship.

Splash!

Neana leaned over the side, trying to spot him. There: floating in the wake just off the rudder, splashing angrily. She had only had enough energy left to teleport him a couple of yards, but when you were standing on the edge of a ship, a couple of yards were all it took. He kicked and spluttered and waved his arms as the keel's churning turbulence flipped him end over end. Obviously, like many sailors, he had never learned how to swim. His heavy armor wasn't helping things; the fifty pound, thousand year old gift of his ancestors was dragging him inevitably to the bottom of the sea.

Neana propped both elbows up on the railing and favored him with one of her rare smiles. She had done her part to win this battle, killing six of the _Valaes Tairn's_ best and holding the line until her men could lay down gangplanks. She decided to treat herself.

She watched the captain drown. It took nearly a minute, and was ever so satisfying. Right at the end he seemed to come to terms with it, and, noticing her, raised his fist in–

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"Guess who?"

Neana awoke with a start. She was blind. She was naked and unarmed. Someone was standing nearby. She felt hands on her body.

Instinctively, her fingers worked in familiar patterns, coaxing power from the void through sheer force of will. Beneath her skin, the veins of her palms and wrist thickened and grew black, and her fingernails curved into talons. She moved to grab her attacker and fill his or her veins with dark energy, siphoning the very life out of their desiccated corpse –

She recognized the voice. "Sam!"

The hands covering her eyes parted, and Neana could see again. She spun around, sloshing water out of the tub, and glared at the woman behind her. "Sam," she rasped, as close as she could get to a scream, "What the hells were you thinking?"

"Neat," the other woman said, staring at Neana's hands. "I've never seen you do that spell before."

Neana glanced down at the miasma of vaporous black energy that wreathed her now clawlike fingers. With a snarl, she slapped her palm flat against the planks of the bath house; the spell discharged with a crackle of profane power and a brief stench of sulfur that left the wood charred black. Neana felt a tingling sensation as the pitiful lifeforce from a few hundred termites filled her veins.

"Damnit," she snarled. "Never do that. I could have killed you!"

"Doubtful," Sam smiled. "I'm still faster than you."

Sam was a Changeling, as well as the Mother Bear's First Bow and Neana's longtime lover. She was in her natural form right now: a tall, slender, and androgynous mix of human and doppelganger features. At the moment she had milky white eyes, thin lips, shoulder length white hair, and gaunt, prominent cheekbones – but with a thought she could look like anyone she wished to. She had also, Neana noticed, taken the time to change out of her military uniform and into something fashionable.

And she was smirking.

In the grips of adrenaline withdrawal, Neana was livid. Her muscles, relaxed from her doze in the steamy bath, were now twisted and taught with frustration and she could feel the first dark throbs of a massive headache coming on. She turned her back, letting herself drop limply back into the tub, and focused all of her energy on not killing her girlfriend.

Soon she felt a pair of hands drop lightly onto her shoulders. She resisted the urge to swat them away. Sam's hands flexed, and her fingers gently gripped Neana's shoulders, kneading her tense muscles. "I'm sorry," the other woman said. "Sometimes I do things without thinking them through."

"Really?" Neana muttered, "I never noticed."

Sam's hands paused for a moment. "Let's not start that old argument again." They went back to work, lower now, her thumbs finding little pockets of tension around Neana's shoulder blades and caressing them away.

Neana let her work. Though she was a fountain of endless rage at the best of times, it was hard for her to maintain her anger at Sam. After years of... whatever the hell you called their relationship, they had learned to press each other's buttons too well: Sam was an expert at deflecting her anger. And she did have wonderfully skilled hands.

"Let me make it up to you," Sam said, briefly stopping the massage. "We'll play a game. Pick a face."

"Sam," she warned

"No, go ahead. Pick a face."

Neana sighed. "I'm not turning around."

"That's fine." Neana's view of the bathhouse wall was interrupted when Sam thrust a hand in front of her, fingers wiggling. "Just... pick a face."

"I don't know…"

"It could be anyone. It could be Chandra..." Sam's hand, previously white and callused, became slender and bronzed with a dot-work pattern tattooed into the webbing between thumb and forefinger. "It could be Natalya..." Sam's skin rippled and flowed like wax, her hand becoming pale with lacquered, crimson nails. "It could even be that barmaid with the big tits I see you staring at sometimes." Even paler now, plump and freckled. "Go on. Surprise me."

"Alexia ir' Arth," Neana said. She watched Sam's hand shift again: her fingers grew thick and coarse from years spent gripping a ship's helm, her knuckles red from weather, her skin tanned from the sun.

"Now that's mean. You'll get us both in trouble if the good Captain ever finds out."

"I know," Neana whispered. She gave another chilly little smile as she felt Sam's fingers go back to work on her back. What a silly show. There were any number of tiresome complications in having a Changeling for a lover, and the constant addiction to drama was only one of them. Using her thumbs, Sam pressed and stroked her lover's tired muscles; delicately avoiding the fine ridges of old scar tissue and massaging circulation back into the muscles beneath. She coaxed Neana to lean forward in the tub and expose more of her back. She worked in silence for several minutes, an interminable wait for the chatty Changeling, before speaking again.

"So how was your trip, dear?" Sam asked.

"I killed elves." Neana replied.

"So you had fun then?" Sam kept her voice perfectly level; she didn't share her friend's views on genocide. It was a sore spot between them.

"Heh. Yes." Neana rolled the dream over in her mind again, tasting the victory. "There was a captain. I took his sword."

"Double scimitar?" Sam asked.

"Of course."

"I'll never understand how they swing those stupid things without cutting their own ears off." Sam stopped her kneading. "Did he give you this?" Her fingers found a red and swollen line of puckered flesh running from Neana's armpit to her elbow. Captain ir'Arth had done her best to stem the blood loss and prevent infection, but the cold and burning grace of the Silver Flame always left scars behind.

"No, that was just some kid..." Neana hesitated. Sam's dexterous fingers had worked their way down her back and were now perilously close to the half-elf's southern regions, and it was having the effect that she had probably intended. Neana felt a heat that had nothing to do with the bathwater. "He got a lucky swing, I guess. Here, let me see you."

"I knew you'd want to play my game." Neana didn't need Chandra's powers to know that Sam was grinning behind her.

"Just... shut up and let me see you."

Smirking, Sam stepped around the side of the huge bath tub and... wow. It was Alexia ir'Arth, in the flesh. Some of the details were wrong – she was wearing Sam's outfit, a pair of tight leather leggings and a frilly shirt that the conservative older captain would never be seen in, and the grin and body language was pure Sam – but the rest was amazing. Before Neana stood a beautiful human woman with twinkling blue eyes, cropped blond hair, and deeply etched smile lines around her perfect white teeth. It was a face Neana knew better than her own after five years spent serving aboard the Dire Kitten.

"Do you want to see more?" Sam teased.

"Oh, she is going to kill us if she finds out," Neana whispered.

"Who, me?" Her voice was perfect too. Sam donned a look of doe-eyed innocence. "Why, I'm the nicest, sweetest ship's Captain in all of Khorvaire! Stern but fair, that's me. Kind to puppies and beggars and children. I even worship the most perfect and ordered pillar of the Silver Flame, despite the diametric opposition between the principles of my faith and the gritty realities of my chosen profession. I'm beautiful and strong and holy and I get along with everyone!" She laughed a hearty, honest laugh.

"She is going to go completely Inquisition on our backsides." Neana mumbled. "Gods, she is going to go spare."

"Really?" Sam, the spitting image of Captain ir'Arth, started toying gently with the top button of her silk shirt. She winked. "But we haven't even done anything yet."

Neana blinked. Somewhere, the last straw broke. "Get in the tub," she ordered.

There were also bonuses to having a Changeling lover.


	4. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Afterwards, Sam cradled Neana in her arms. The Changeling was, by nature, a hugger. She had dropped the ir'Arth disguise and put on the face she usually wore around Neana; that of a young female half-elf, with coppery red hair and dark green eyes. In all other ways she resembled her natural state; instead of being disguised as another person, she simply became Sam the Khorovar instead of Sam the Changeling. It was a Changeling custom, she had explained, intended to put the members of other races at ease while still maintaining a Changeling's individuality. Neana preferred this form to Sam's real one. Although she would never say it to Sam's face, for fear of hurting her feelings, she found the Changeling's true form to be unnerving. It wasn't an ugly face, but it was alien and sexless and cold. Neana had a difficult time kissing her nearly nonexistent lips, staring into her milky white eyes, or being aroused by her practically boyish body. That she did so, from time to time, was a mute testament of her deep commitment to their friendship.

"I love you," Sam said.

"Yeah," Neana replied. "I love you too." Every time she said it, it was a little easier than the last. Either she was getting to be a better liar, or she meant it. Neana wasn't sure herself; she and her emotions were reluctant acquaintances.

The Changeling snuggled against Neana, altering her shape to make it fit seamlessly to the other woman. Sam asked, "Did you hear something a few minutes ago?"

"Yeah, a lot of things. 'Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods, this is wonderful, keep doing that, yes, yes, yes, I'm almost there,'" Neana deadpanned.

"No, damn it," Sam laughed. "Like a loud bang."

"I think my foot hit the wall at one point. Does that help?"

"Fine, be that way." Sam said.

They lay in silence for a time, impossible to tell how long. Cradled in warmth and comfort, and doubly exhausted by both her months at sea and her more recent exertions, Neana dozed. Her eyes snapped open with a jerk when Sam spoke, "Something feels wrong."

"What?" Neana asked, irritated.

"I don't know. There's just this sense I get, in the back of my mind, that something is going wrong. A foreboding. You know what I mean?"

"Sure."

"Maybe it's the war. It's not going well for our side."

"Pfft," Neana snorted. "It's not going well for anyone's side. Cyre's doing fine, comparatively."

"How can you say that?" Sam retorted. "We lost the South–"

"Traitorous fucking elves!"

"Yes. Okay, granted." Sam sighed. "But still, we did lose the South. And the East, even though that was nothing but halflings and desert. And Breland took the southwest territories."

"And then the gobbos took it right back from Breland." Neana countered.

"I'm just saying that we're losing more than we're winning lately."

"It's the nature of war," Neana shrugged. "And that's all old news anyway. Decades old. The Hobgoblins betrayed Breland before you were born. The elves betrayed us before _I_ was born. The border lines get redrawn a dozen times every year."

Sam laughed. "I forget, sometimes, that you're an old maid."

"Not. That. Old." Neana made her voice iron.

"You're just lucky that when I'm old and wrinkled, and you're still looking young and pert, I'll still be able to make myself look any age I want. People will see the two of us and think that I'm your daughter."

Neana didn't respond. Privately, she doubted that this relationship, or, frankly, she herself, would ever survive to see old age. It worried her, the way Sam kept growing closer and closer, insinuating herself in dozens of tiny ways into Neana's life. Their relationship was doomed from the moment it began. She could see the tragedy coming from leagues away, and yet she could not find in herself the courage to stop it.

To begin with, it was illegal. Both women were ranking officers in the Cyran navy; lieutenants, though Neana had seniority. That made them, and especially the acts they had so recently performed, a breach of protocol, a conflict of interest, and conduct unbecoming an officer. If either Cpt. Ir'Arth or Sam's captain, the cranky old soldier who commanded the Mother Bear, ever found out, they both would have hell to pay. Only Sam's natural talents for disguise had allowed them to keep their rendezvous and trysts secret every time they managed to be in port together.

Because of that, it wasn't, and would never be, much of a relationship. They grabbed time together whenever they could – a week here, on leave, a month there, while the ships were in dry dock – but that was all they had, and all they had to look forward to in the future. Neana had no interest in quitting the navy, and while Sam had considered it, she had too many ties to the military. All of which meant that their love, such as it was, came with an expiration date. But ever since their two ships had been paired together in harassing Breland's coast last year and they had spent an unprecedented amount of time with one another, Sam had shown increasing signs that she was forgetting these basic facts. The more futile things became, the closer she clung.

The other problem was Neana herself. She had known, since the death of her parents, that she would never be right or healthy again. Something small and basic and decent inside her had leaked out of her opened throat and soaked into the parched Talenta grasslands. Over the years she had become reconciled to its loss. It was fine. Whatever she had lost, she was capable of surviving without it. She lived her life from moment to moment, taking revenge against the elves every time it became possible, and thanked the Six for the opportunity. Some day she would die, on the edge of a _Valaes Tairn_ blade, and that too was fine. It was proper, and satisfying in a way she could not express. Compared to that, this relationship, like all her previous ones, was only temporary.

And yet, it was difficult to end. She felt comfortable with Sam, in a way that she had not in a very long time. So she let it continue, even though she knew that she would someday pay for this small comfort with a commensurate pain when the end came.

Neana realized that the conversation had lapsed into an awkward silence, and that it was her fault. "I wouldn't worry myself about the war," she continued lamely. "It's lasted a hundred years so far. I doubt it will end anytime soon. I'm sure the Great War will outlive us all."

"So you don't have any hope that the Northern fleet will win? Admiral ir'Matast has a half our ships within a fireball's toss of Flamekeep. Thrane and that little priestess must be shaking in her slippers."

"Maybe," Neana replied. "I wouldn't get my hopes up."

"You're too cynical." Sam sighed. "It must be amazing, to be in the heart of all that action. And to serve under ir'Matast. I've heard she's a genius when it comes to strategy and tactics. I mean, she has to be! We've never exactly had much of a navy, not like Breland or Karnath and their damn Lhazaaran mercenary fleet. Cyre isn't a warlike nation. With as few ships as she's got, she's accomplished some amazing things. Think about it! Right now, at this moment, they might be laying siege to Flamekeep. I wish I was there with them."

"I don't," Neana said. She had been present at the siege of Arythawn Keep fourteen years ago, as a raw marine recruit on the deck of the Bellhammer. She would never forget it. Five months spent ferrying supplies to the ground troops entrenched around the castle's earthworks. Two weeks spent lobbing boulders at the impenetrable battlements. Hours spent screaming and passing buckets of water, as the crack Thranish archers lobbed fire arrows into the advancing fleet. And then one night the archers had filed, silently, back into the keep to be replaced by a line of white figures. She remembered vividly the way the holy clerics of the Silver Flame had stood, praying, atop the battlements in their white tabards and gleaming mail. Fifty of them, bearing no weapons and firing no arrows, had linked hands in sight of Cyre's fleet and chanted a simple phrase, over and over. She hadn't understood the language, but it had still filled her with terror.

The sailors came to understand the cleric's actions too late. Their first inkling came when the Bellhammer began listing to starboard; a terrified young sailor had stared over the side and screamed, _"The ocean's gone!"_ Neana had gone to see for herself, only to discover that he was half-right; the clerics had made a hole, somehow, in the water, like pulling the plug from the drain of a sink. The water just dropped away, and pulled more water in after it, creating the biggest and most hellish whirlpool Neana would ever see. They were caught in its grip, and all struggle was futile. You couldn't beat gravity. The Bellhammer rolled to the side, its prow falling away and down, pointing the ship directly into the maelstrom. Those crew who weren't fast enough in grabbing a rope or lashing themselves to a piece of the ship had slipped and tumbled down the now vertical deck. Clinging to the railing, Neana watched one unfortunate soul fall, screaming, from the quarterdeck to smack headfirst into the main mast with a wet and sickening sound. His screaming ended, he slipped from the mast to drop limply into the sea...

Neana shivered. It had all turned out to be a feint by their side, a ploy to draw out the keep's defending spellcasters. The Cyran admiral in charge of the fleet had endangered half a dozen of his own ships to tempt the besieged Thranes into the open air. Before the Bellhammer had even finished being ripped apart by angry waves, a squad of Cyran arcanists had emerged from hiding to sweep the chanting clerics from the battlements with bolts of fire and acid.

"No," she said. "You never want to see seigework. Not ever. Believe me."

Sam's response was a comforting hug and, after a moment's pause, a change of subject. "So what are you going to do with your shore leave?"

"Sleep. Read, a little. Stretch my legs. Eat something that hasn't been salted and left in a barrel for five months."

"Ah, the infamous excesses and debaucheries of a sailor on shore leave," Sam said.

"Heh. So what about you? Do you have plans that don't involve soaking in this tub until you get finger wrinkles?"

"I thought I'd see a show," Sam said, wistfully. "There's an Orien coach that stops in Lorn, and they have theaters. It's been forever seen I've seen a proper play. A real one, with a stage that isn't two barn doors nailed to some crates, and actors that actually memorize their lines. Lorn has all that; Seaside might be big, but it's too crude and maritime-y. A hundred merchants, a dozen pubs, and not one decent playhouse. In Lorn, I've heard they might even hire on a House Phiarlan company, and that means illusionists! I know you aren't really fond of all things elvish," she added quickly, before Neana's face could darken, "but Phiarlin is the good kind of elves, not the evil betraying mercenary kind." She sighed. "I haven't seen a good play since... oh. Since our second date, I guess."

"That wasn't a play," Neana replied. "That was an opera."

"So?"

"So there's a reason we haven't been to another one."

"And what's that?" Sam asked archly.

"Look: plays are fine. I like plays, with dialog and plot and people emoting. Opera is just... fat men standing around and singing in elven for five hours until I pass out from boredom."

"And drool on my shoulder, as I recall. There's nothing wrong with opera," Sam said. "It's cultural. I know you may have grown up in a backwater, but I was born in the big city and we appreciate–" She stopped.

"What?" Neana asked.

"Something's wrong."

Neana glanced around the empty bathhouse. "I don't see anything…?"

"_Something is wrong_," Sam shouted, and leaped out of the tub. Water slopped over the lip of the copper vessel and ran in rivulets down her body as she paced the room. She gripped the sides of her head, planting both fists behind her ears and squeezing it between her forearms as if to keep the pain inside. "It's Hopper."

"What, your pet bird?"

"He's trying to tell me something." And then she screamed; a loud and unending sound that filled the tiny bath room. Neana realized, perking up her ears, that Sam wasn't alone. There were screams in the distance, outside the Guard's Rest. It was impossible to say how far.

Neana stood up and stepped carefully out of the tub. "You're right, something is wrong." she said. "We need to see what it is."

Sam nodded grimly. She had found her clothes. The pain seemed to have passed. "I'm sure the others are already dealing with it. If _I_ can feel this, I know Chandra can. I'll help you put on your armor, and then we'll go."

"No need," Neana said, pulling the loose gambeson over her damp body. " _To me _!" At the word of command, her armor disappeared from its cubbyhole storage space and reappeared on her body. Clasps fitted, bolts bolted, and straps tightened themselves. In the space of a breath she went from dripping and nearly naked to fully armored, if chafing.

"Wow." Sam said. "Where can I get armor like that?"

"You kill enough elves," Neana replied, drawing Sharneth from its resting place, "and the Admiralty will give you an entire armory. Come on."

Sam sighed, and tugged on her breeches.

When they emerged from the cellars, they found the common room of the Guard's Rest empty. Not even the serving staff had stayed behind. Everywhere she looked, Neana saw signs of recent evacuation: overturned chairs, cracked dishes, spilt ale. Entire tables had been flipped over in the room's occupants' hurry to leave.

"Why didn't we hear this?" Neana asked. Sam shrugged mutely. It made little sense; Neana's heritage gave her excellent hearing, and Sam was a veteran military scout. They could not have missed the sounds of stomping boots, splintering wood, or smashing pottery. Odd, and inexplicable. From the twilight streaming through the inn's tiny, dusty windowpanes, Neana realized hours must have past while she and Sam indulged themselves.

"My bow's upstairs in my room." Sam said.

"Meet me outside when you find it. I need to see what's going on."

The street outside the inn was carpeted with the dead. Neana, veteran of a hundred battlefields, was shocked. There were hundreds of corpses, if not thousands; more people than she would have guessed could fit in Seaside. It was hard to make a count of them, for a thick grey mist had rolled in on the tide, and concealed everything but this one street. There was no blood or gore, no signs of violence. Each person had crumpled to the ground where they stood, sprawling in the dusty street. Here and there were a few tucked into doorways and huddled up in corners, as if they had seen their doom coming and tried to flee.

Nearly every body had fallen facing south. They had been moving towards the sea.

Neana stalked among them, numbed, searching for she knew not what. There were humans and elves and dwarves and even gobos; many, which she had at first taken to be children, turned out to be Halflings and Gnomes. Many others really were children. Those who had fallen face upwards wore expressions of surprise, fear, and a kind of crushing despair. Their sorrowful faces scared her even more than their corpsitude, somehow. The tears streaking their dusty cheeks were still wet; either they had died only minutes ago, or the dead were weeping. She found people she knew among the dead: sailors in Cyran uniform, Janis, the barmaid who had drawn her bath, and merchants she had known from the town. She thanked the Six that none of them were her marines, or officers from either the Kitten or the Bear. She found many, many more that she had never seen before, often wearing fancy clothing of a style you rarely saw in the hardworking port of Seaside; rags and silks and noble's finery, they had all died together. Many of them were caked in road dust and showed other signs of recent travel.

A picture was emerging, but it made no sense. Refugees had flooded into the city from the north, a mob of people of every race. They brought nothing with them; Neana saw only a handful of knapsacks and packs. Whatever had compelled them to flee, it had not left them any time at all in which to prepare. They had fled south, coming to Seaside, and then they had died in moments.

Neana looked to the north, but saw only a grey wall of mist. Thick tendrils of the fog were even now creeping down the street and into open doorways. The fog hadn't come from the sea at all, she realized, but from the north, from the direction all these people were fleeing. It wasn't natural weather, and she felt an urge to get far away from it. Only the thought of Sam restrained her from fleeing south herself.

A flicker of movement caught her eye. Was the misty wall closer now than when she had first begun searching the street? Yes, she decided, and either the sky was lightening beyond the dreary clouds, or the mist itself had begun to glow dimly. And then someone came shambling out of it: a man, wearing the ragged remnants of a Cyran uniform, torn to bloody shreds around his shoulders and waist. Deep, bleeding gashes marred his torso. He moved like the walking dead – not an uncommon site on battlefields of Karnath – but his face showed some life and his eyes skittered restlessly from side to side. It took her some time to recognize him.

"Paulo?" Neana's voice was oddly muffled in the misty air, and she got her first inkling of how she had missed the massacre. The grey fog sucked the sound away, stealing the whisper right out of her torn throat. Regardless, the wrecked man didn't respond to his name, and his jittery gaze passed over her without recognition. She noticed that his hands were blackened and withered as if they had passed through a fire. Exposed nubs of spiky bone made his fingers into gruesome claws.

She raised _Sharneth_. "Stay back, Paulo." She couldn't even hear herself speak; the mist had grown that cloying. Soon it might begin drawing the breath out of her body as well. Neana stepped towards him, preparing a deathblow. The air tonight was practically throbbing with ominous energy and, with concentration, Neana borrowed a little. She wreathed her falchion's edge in thin strands of crackling lightning. Whatever had befallen Paulo seemed horrific and unnatural, and she wasn't about to let him infect her with it. Besides, it would probably be a mercy.

Paulo's eyes focused on her blade and his pupils began to glow with the dull orange light of banked embers. The crackle of magic in the air seemed to lend him vitality. He snarled hungrily and, to Neana's astonishment, a plume of mist poured out of his open mouth. It enveloped her face, blinding her and filling her nostrils with the stench of rot and decay. It clung to her face, no matter how she tried to wave it away. She was blind now as well as deaf.

Neana, desperate, spoke the word of flight; a pair of translucent bat-like wings formed on her back. They flapped frantically, hurling her up and out of the mist with such force that the vapors lost their grip on her. She touched down lightly on the roof of a nearby shop and felt the magic fade; the spell only lasted a handful of seconds. From the street below Paulo stared hungrily at her sword, still wreathed in sparking energy. It seemed to be the only thing that existed, as far as he was concerned. She considered her next move. Neana wouldn't be safe up here for very long; Paulo, with his bony claws, looked like a good climber.

Suddenly a screech shattered the mist's deadly silence. Neana glanced up, as surprised at finally hearing anything in this stifling gloom as she was by the source of the noise. Hopper, Sam's pet hawk, was diving through the pale mist. He struck Paulo in the face like a feathery missile, gouging and clawing into the infected man's face. The bird was possessed with murderous frenzy as it tried to destroy the unnatural abomination.

Paulo didn't cry out in pain, not even when the hawk's talons punctured his eyeball and the thin jelly ran streaming down his face; instead he knocked the bird away from him with a casual backhand. There must have been tremendous strength behind the blow, because Hopper was thrown clear across the street and smacked into an adjacent wall with a wet thud. It fell, twitching, to the ground. Paulo turned the orange glow of his remaining eye upon Neana, and began walking towards the wall.

"Hopper!" Sam's scream of rage arrived in Neana's ears like a whisper. The Changeling appeared in the upper window of the Guard's Rest, wearing a hastily donned mail shirt and an expression of incoherent anger. In the blink of an eye she had an arrow fitted to the string of her prize longbow – a Cannith Firebow Mk. II with pearl inlays, specially created for Cyran officers in the great creation forges at Whitehearth – and with a breath she loosed it. A bright line of fire traced the distance between Sam's bow and Paulo's chest.

Paulo finally made a sound, a hoarse inhuman cry of rage, as the burning shaft set his tattered uniform ablaze. Another arrow joined it, and then another, as his cries grew louder and more desperate. He swatted desperately at the flames with his hands, trying to extinguish his bubbling flesh.

Time to put an end to this.

Neana called her wings. Drifting gently down from the roof, she landed behind the roaring human torch that had been her soldier. With a sweep of her blade she decapitated him. She had been afraid that this would not kill whatever he had become, but both head and body fell to the ground with a thump and a splatter. Tiny arcs of residual lightning made his dead limbs twitch in the street.

She stabbed it a few times until it stopped moving. It paid to be thorough.

"Hopper!" Sam leapt out of the window, slid down the hardwood shingles, and dropped nimbly to the ground, accomplishing with dexterous skill something that, for Neana and her heavy armor, had required magical aide. She ran to the body of her animal friend but it was obvious to Neana that the bird was beyond saving. Sam picked up its limp form and cradled it in her arms.

"Sam," Neana said as gently as she could. "We don't have time to mourn."

Sam spun on her lover, tears streaming down her cheeks, and prepared a nasty retort. She looked down at the death and destruction around her, and thought better of it. She laid Hopper's body in the street with all the other dead and picked up her bow. "He was a friend."

"I'm sorry," Neana replied. She had never seen the attraction in pets herself, but even she had to admit that the bond between Sam and her hawk had been extraordinary. The two seemed to share an empathic link; Hopper had responded to her slightest commands and Sam, for her part, seemed to know what the bird was thinking. Usually this was "feed me!" but, what the hell, it was a bird.

"Let's just get to the ships," Sam said.


	5. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The docks were a nightmare. Corpses were sprawled everywhere; the teeming masses of refugees had come here in the hopes of catching a ship to flee from whatever had pursued them, and most of them had died here, piled together in heaps. Some of the bodies showed signs of trampling: panicked crowds must have overrun each other, fleeing in fear from… something.

Others had escaped. Neana felt pangs of unaccustomed joy when she saw the first survivors, huddled desperately aboard a boat out in the harbor. There had been a dozen ships docked in Seaside when she had arrived onboard the Kitten earlier in the day; ten of them were currently adrift in the harbor, loaded to the gills with frightened Cyrans. Even more people had decided to take their chances in swimming, or were floating helplessly in the harbor, clinging to barrels or scraps of wood. Only two ships hadn't set sail yet: the Mother Bear and the Dire Kitten.

"They waited for us," Neana said. "How sweet."

Sam grabbed her arm and pointed, mutely.

The Butcher of Seaside wasn't much to look at. Really, there was barely anything _there_ to see: Neana at first took it to be a shadow cast by a ship. Then it moved. To her eyes it looked like a heavy black cloud of smoke: a section of the strange grey mist made dark and amoebic and alive. It roiled and shift as parts of it moved independently of the rest.

"Is it alive?" Sam asked.

"It's moving," Neana answered grimly.

One section stretched out from the main mass into a kind of ephemeral appendage and prodded gently at the bodies surrounding it, testing hungrily for life. Another questing tendril oozed off the edge of the pier to touch the water, and from the water in apparent disgust. Then its wandering strands found the Kitten's mooring lines. To her horror, the heavy black shape seemed to pour upward along the lines: it was trying to climb aboard her ship!

"Like hell!" she screamed. With a thought she hurled her most powerful spell at the creature; ghostly versions of the ship's heavy hemp mooring ropes sprang into existence, weaving over and through the soft black mass. The creature stopped climbing and pawed at the bindings with its tendrils; only magical ties could impede its formless bulk. Neana heard a cheer go up from the Kitten's decks, and she saw a few brave souls rush the side to try and hack away the mooring lines before the creature could resume climbing. One of them wandered too close to a flailing strand of the creature: the second it brushed his skin, he collapsed to the deck.

"Don't!" Sam called, but it was too late. Neana used her magical advantage to charge, screaming, at the huge monster. While half its bulk clung to the side of her ship, the other half of the huge monster still lay inert and bound on the pier. As she ran Neana cast the same spell she had used earlier when startled in the bath, this time funneling all the dark energy into _Sharneth. _Her long, curved blade became wreathed in pulsing black rot. She plunged her sword into the monster's murky center in feral triumph and it recoiled in unmistakable agony away from the tip of her dimly glowing blade. An instant later her magic took hold, and she felt her sword vibrate, pulsating with dark heartbeats as the monster's life flow up the length of her blade and into her body. She was, for a moment, engorged with black and loathsome power, suffused with the raw distillation of life and death. Incarnate vitality: it was better than sex.

She was so flushed with energy that the creature's counter attack caught her completely off guard. A tendril lashed her across the face and hurled her to the floorboards. The same dark energy she had consumed a moment before blasted through her.

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"_Be good for Mommy, Ne-ne. Don't make a peep." _

_That's what her Mommy had said and so she would be very good, even if she was scared. Especially if she was scared. Later she knew she would go to Mommy and tell her how scared she had been, and how quiet she had been, and Mommy and Daddy would both tell her how brave and good she had been, and they would hold her and maybe give her a sweet. After Mommy and Daddy had scared the bad man away._

_Neana could see the bad man from inside the cupboard where Mommy had put her, because the cupboard had a cracked board in it, which made the cupboard a very good place to go hide and seek in when Mommy wasn't looking. The bad man had funny shiny clothes on, and wasn't really a man; he was an elf. He had pointy ears, not a little bit pointy like her ears, but really pointy. They stuck out from the white sheet he had wrapped around his head so that you couldn't see his face except for the eyes. His eyes looked funny._

_The bad man would run away any minute now, because Neana's dad was so scary. Neana couldn't even look at him when his face got that scary; it was like her Daddy went away and somebody else was there instead. He only got that way when he talked about the War. A lot of people's parents in the village had fought in the War, Neana knew. Shem's mom had never come back, and he cried if you talked about it. Shem was a crybaby, though. Neana's Daddy had come back before she was born, and he had brought the Crossbow back with him. It was huge – Neana couldn't hardly even pick it up! – and there were little arrows you put in it. On Cyrday festivals he would take it to the village square and win contests with it; he would shoot the Crossbow at stacks of hay with circles painted on, and hit right in the middle most of the time. Nobody in the village could shoot as well as Neana's Daddy._

_He would shoot the bad man right in the face!_

_Any minute now._

_Neana's Mommy hadn't fought in the war, and she wasn't really scary, but she had a pitchfork and that was dangerous. She had the pitchfork pointed right at the bad man, and he would poke himself right in the belly if he came any closer._

_The bad man said something, but Neana didn't understand it; it was maybe elvish, but funny sounding elvish, not like they spoke in the village. Her Daddy said "No," in a big deep voice. Her Daddy was a big man, and the elf was a little skinny man. The bad man didn't have a Crossbow or even a pitchfork, just some shiny clothes and some weird curvy thing on his back. A scythe, maybe. The bad elf ought to be scared of Neana's Daddy. The bad elf would probably run away._

_Any minute now. He'd run for sure._

_The Crossbow made a slap sound, and Neana was shocked. Her Daddy had shot someone! The pointy little arrow kind of bounced off the bad elf's shiny metal clothes and fell on the ground. He didn't even act like it hurt. Neana whimpered. She had promised to be good and brave, but she was very, very scared. She was sure in a second she would make a mess in her dress, she was so scared, because the bad elf wasn't running away. The bad elf was coming closer, and reaching for the thing on his back._

_When he moved, she couldn't see it. He was too fast. All she saw was her Daddy's head fall off. _

_Blood._

_Neana screamed. She screamed until her lungs gave out. She screamed until the breath would no longer come and her eyes rolled up in her head and her knees buckled. She screamed until her voice cracked and broke and then she screamed in great hoarse gasps. _

_It was a mercy, in a way, because she was too blinded by tears to witness the death of her Mother. After the spray of red arterial blood gushing from her father's neck, the next thing Neana saw was a blinding light as the cupboard was yanked open, a flash of watered steel, and then the floor as she tumbled out of the cupboard. She couldn't recall the feel of steel slitting her throat, only the feeling of sticky wetness as her own blood soaked through the front of her dress. Then darkness._

_--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _

Chilly tears on her cheek. A dead, numbing coldness in her limbs. Ashes in her mouth."You're alive," Sam said.

"Am I?" Neana shuddered. She wasn't so certain.

"I thought I'd lost you." Tears trickled down the Changeling's cheeks and fell in spatters on Neana's breastplate. Sam was holding Neana, cradling the half-elf on her lap. Neana stared dully past her lover's face and up into the gloomy twilight. The grey shroud had spread to the sky, making it impossible to tell how long she had been down. The mist was glowing now with the pale, sickly light of swampfire.

"I should be dead," Neana said. Her eyelids grew heavy. "I wish I was…" She closed her eyes and felt the numbness spreading. It would be so easy to drift away. Much easier than staying.

Sam slapped her.

Neana raised a gauntlet to her cheek, letting the spiked steel rest against her stinging flesh. That had hurt! Sam's eyes narrowed, and she drew her hand back to deliver another blow. With a wiry archer's strength she delivered a backhand so powerful Neana could feel her teeth loosen.

"Don't you say that. Don't you ever say that again." Sam – silly, mercurial, neurotic Sam – looked as murder. Her milky white eyes burned with emotion. "I'm not letting you quit on me."

The pain brought color back into Neana's cheeks, and with it a little bit of energy. She felt the return of her situational awareness; the paranoid animal part of her mind that had been observing everything that went on around her and keeping tabs on what might get her killed. She was lying on a section of the dock a good fifty paces away from where she had stabbed the creature, Sam was cradling her, and they were alone. Her mouth tasted like blood and rot, and every time she inhaled she smelled sea salt mixed with corpse. She reached, instinctively, for _Sharneth_: still in her hand. Good. She was safe, for the moment. Now where was her prey?

"Where is it?" Neana asked. She tried to sit up but she was as weak as a child.

Sam relaxed. "Still attacking the Kitten. It can't climb very well, and they've severed most of the mooring cables."

"How long was I…?"

"About half a minute. After you stopped moving, it lost interest, and I managed to drag you away." Sam shivered. "I thought you were dead."

"Almost." Neana managed to sit up. Her body didn't want to obey even the most basic commands. "I think I know what it does. When it hit me, I felt…" The memory, that old pain that she thought she had locked away, threatened to resurface, but Neana shoved it back down the well. "It hits you with the worst moment of your life. Makes you relive it, over and over again. Forces you to watch. Until you give up and die."

"Your parents?" Sam asked.

"Yeah," Neana replied curtly. She thrust Sam's hands away before the pity could sicken her. "There's some powerful death magic bound up in that creature. In fact, I think that's all that thing is: magic. Gaseous, living magic." She closed her eyes. "The people in the streets… they must have been defenseless. It doesn't need to fight or attack; all it needs to do to kill is touch its victims. It just passed through them, like a cold wind, and they died where they stood."

"That's horrible."

Neana shrugged. "That's death magic for you. And that's what that thing is made of: the pure, concentrated essence of death." With Sam's help, Neana tottered to her feet. She had to use _Sharneth_ like a walking stick to keep her balance. "We have to kill it."

"No," Sam said, firmly gripping Neana's arm. "I'm not letting you go back after it again."

"It's going after _my ship_. I'll defend her with every breath in my body, same as you would." Grimly Neana took a step forward, and then another.

"Look at you, you can barely stand!" Sam countered. "If you try to fight in the state you're in, you'll just end up dead."

"Then at least I'll die on my feet," Neana retorted, "with a sword in my hand and a ship's deck beneath me." Her voice was a raw weal of pain; she hadn't spoken this forcefully in years, and it cost her. While the rest of her body was numb, her scarred throat was livid with pain.

Sam hung her head, letting her hand slip from her lover's shoulder. "You'll still be dead. Just like them." Her gesture took in the corpses on the pier, the piles of bodies still littering the streets of Seaside and beyond, masked now by the rolling fog. That trail might stretch all the way inland, to the heart of Cyre. The mist had started inland and spread outwards; for all they knew, it had covered the whole continent by now.

"You want to die with a ship beneath your feet?" Sam asked. "How do you plan on getting there? That monster is between you and the Kitten. Are you going to use your little tricks to jump over it? Are you going to grow wings and float? It's huge; it will just swat you out of the sky like an insect."

She was probably right, Neana realized. The half-elf could barely feel her heart beat, let alone the tingling pulse of her magic. If she tried to summon her wings, or leap a building, there was no guarantee that the magic would answer her. She might charge in and die pathetically, bereft of her power.

"What else would you have me do?" she asked.

"Help me," Sam replied. "Get me to the Mother Bear." She gestured, and Neana realized that while she had been busy dying, the other warship had finished casting off its lines and raising anchor. The heavy dromond was unfurling its sails and drawing away from the pier.

When she saw Neana hesitating, Sam said "You want to hurt that thing? Let me help. Get me to my ship, and I'll get you the best archers in the fleet. I trained them myself."

"I don't…"

"Look," Sam overrode her. She's got heavy ballista, a ship's magus, and Captain Klein. And Klein's a lot scarier than any damned death magic." Sam grasped her lover's hand. "We'll fight it my way; from a distance. So what if it's touch brings death? We won't let it touch us."

Neana sighed and nodded. "Fine. If I'm going to die, at I'll die in good company." She flexed her fingers and watched flickering, ghostly light dance across her knuckles. The magic still answered her call, for now. "Lend me your shoulder. If you can hobble me to the edge of the pier before the Bear crosses the jetty, I'll get you onboard."

Smiling weakly, Sam offered her a hand.


	6. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

With a scream and a thump the two women landed.

The magic had almost given out on her halfway across the water; maintaining the wing spell was extraordinarily taxing, and she couldn't keep it going very long on days when she hadn't almost died. Only the shouts of encouragement from the Bear's crew and the fact that Sam's life was riding with her gave her the energy to keep the two of them from crashing into the sea. The Changeling, like many people, had turned out to be terrified of flying. Sam had squeezed her eyes shut and latched onto Neana with the tenacity of a barnacle.

It was not the most dignified flight in the history of Khorvaire.

Groaning, Neana rolled off the other woman and collapsed in a pile of limbs and armor. She was used up. When a pair of the Bear's crewmen offered to help her to her feet, she almost didn't accept. Right now Sam's well being, her revenge, and even the safety of her ship paled in comparison to her desire for a week-long nap. In the end, she took their proffered hands and staggered upright.

Completely by accident she had managed to land right next to the ship's captain. He was staring intently through a long, ornate spyglass and paying her no attention. She reflexively saluted.

"Permission to come aboard?" She wheezed. "Sir?"

Captain Klein only had one good eye: the other was covered by an eye patch, a fitted leather thong wrapped around his head. It had a stylized bear's head sewn onto it.

He didn't bother to pry his single eye away from the telescoping glass when answered. "Lt. Tacey. And I see you've brought me back my Changeling. Good. Changelings are hard to find, and I think we need her to fulfill some kind of interspecies quota. Anything to keep the admirals back home happy."

Sam bounced to her feet. Now that she was back on her ship and no longer suspended precipitously over the briny depths, she was grinning again. "Sorry I'm late, Boss. Ran into a speck of trouble with a beast from the nether hells."

"Well you do have a way of making friends," he said dryly. "You failed to kill it, I couldn't help but notice."

"Well, sir, it's like this: Neana – Lt. Tacey, here – gave it her best shot, but I'll be damned if that thing isn't immune to swords. It slapped her down, and after that she was left feeling quite poorly, so we thought it best to stage a dignified retreat."

Cpt. Klein sighed and collapsed his spyglass with a snap. He turned to face the two women. "I don't take kindly to things that try to kill me and mine. Not in general. And when I say 'me and mine'," he growled, "I am including you too, Mrs. Tacey. I mean not just my crew, but the whole damn navy."

Neana couldn't hold it in any longer. "Sir! You have to help Captain ir'Arth. I don't know how much longer the Kitten's crew can hold off that creature."

"What do you think we're doing right now, Lieutenant? Square-dancing? As soon as this ship is ready to sail, I'll play the cavalry and come to her rescue. Although Captain ir'Arth is holding her own pretty well, I'd say." Klein pressed the spyglass into her hand. "See for yourself."

Neana snapped it open and stared greedily over the railing. She trained her view along the Kitten's deck, praying to the Keeper to leave her mates alone. She was relieved to see only three corpses; the luckless sailor who had tried to sever the mooring lines and a pair of archers who must have been unlucky. She'd expected much worse. The rest of the crew was huddled at the aft and starboard sections of the ship, as far away from the whipping tentacles as space would allow. In the front port section of the ship, courageously alone, stood Captain ir'Arth. Neana gasped. Alone among the crew, she appeared undimmed and untouched by the monster; in fact, she seemed to glow a little, as if for her and her alone it was a bright, moonlit night and not this gloomy twilight. The black tendrils lashed against her but she ignored them, and with silvery mace and shield she tried to strike back against the vaporous monster.

Neana was shocked. "Why isn't she dead?"

Captain Klein plucked the spyglass from her fingers. "Her god protects her from death. I've known Alexia for years, and you'll never meet a more devout apostle of the Flame than her." He sighed. "Unfortunately, while I've prayed to Dol Arrah for decades, she's never seen fit to send a miracle to protect my muscular brown backside. And I doubt she'll start now. Now: tell me about this thing I have to kill," he commanded.

Sam ticked the points off on her fingers. "It came from the mist. It kills with a touch. It's made of pure death magic. Oh, and I'm pretty sure it hates all that lives and breathes with every arcane fiber of its being. Just a hunch."

Klein sighed. "How do I hurt it? While you two were making your fantastic voyage, my archers have been peppering that thing with arrows every time we get a clear shot. They pass right through that smoky bastard."

"Magic," Neana replied. "It's a creature of magic, so it responds to magic. Only something magically attuned can harm it: spells or weapons."

"Well, that's wonderful. In fact, that's just perfectly appropriate," he growled, "seeing as how the first person that we lost to that creature was the ship's mage."

"Jaken?" Sam looked startled. "Jaken's dead?"

Captain Klein nodded grimly. "It scooped him up right outside the inn's door. It looks like smoke, but if flung him twenty feet. Took out him, the innkeep, and half the serving staff with one of those whippy little arms. Then it ignored the rest of us and headed straight for the docks."

Sam chewed her lip silently as she tried to digest this. Neana pressed onward. "So what else do you have? Wands? A couple of spare enchanted arrows? Anyone else who dabbles in the occult?"

"Just you, half-elf," Klein said bluntly. "And no offense, but you look like the walking dead."

"No one else?" Neana asked. Her pride prevented her from admitting it, but she was down to the bone. The spark was gone from her fingers, and she felt used up and bone dry. Fighting was hard, but throwing spells – twisting her fingers, mind, and voice into a knot to pull power from the void – was infinitely more exhausting. Pride and hate and vengeance were the only things holding her upright at the moment.

"We've been tapped out of magic gewgaws for months. I've seen quartermasters pull blood from rocks that couldn't manage the trick of requisitioning spares from House Cannith," he sighed. "The ship's chaplain has a little of the touch, but she's down below praying over our wounded. We had a couple of seamen and a few townsfolk that survived a brush with that monster. And she ain't much good in a fight anyway."

"Ballista?" she asked. She was getting desperate.

"Haven't tried that yet. The angle's not right. We'll certainly give the beast a broadside when we pass her, but I don't have much faith that they'll hit any harder than the arrows did. Speaking of… Sam!" He snapped, "Lieutenant! You can get to grieving on your own time. I need you on the forecastle with the archers and artillery."

"Sir. Yes, Sir." Sam saluted weakly. When she passed Neana the half-elf clasped her hand; a gentle squeeze of the fingertips and then she was gone.

"You're attacking?" Neana asked. "With what, nasty words? You don't have anything worth throwing."

"That's a Cyran ship out there. Last I checked I'm still wearing the uniform. I'll fight that thing until she's free or we're both dead."

Captain Klein strode across the deck, barking orders furiously. Neana tagged along behind him, feeling useless and empty and spent. This wasn't her or crew, and she felt out of place. Shadows clung to the edge of her vision and she knew that if she stopped moving, she would fall into a deep sleep. As it was she drifted in and out of a light doze, taking a soldier's nap on her feet. When the captain stopped suddenly to give an order to the helmsman, she bumped into him and nearly fell to the ground.

He spun on her. Emotions warred briefly across his normally impassive face before he took her by the shoulders and said, gently, "Lieutenant Tacey, you have my permission to sit this one out. Find a corner to collapse in and have a rest. I don't know what you two got into earlier, but it looks like you went through five rounds with the Dragon Below. You did your part. Sit down."

"If it gets bad enough that we need you," he added dryly, "I'm sure my own First Sword's high pitched, girlish screams will wake you up."

She shook her head numbly. "Got to kill it. Like you said… I'm the best magic you've got."

"I'll make it an order if I have to, Lieutenant." He grabbed her shoulders and gently sat her down on a barrel.

Neana noticed. "The only thing that hurts it," she yawned. "Magic…" Her eyes snapped open. "Fire."

"What?" Klein asked, distracted. He was busy giving orders to a huge, grizzled half-orc middy.

"Fire!" She grabbed his arm. "We fought a thing that came out of the mist – Paulo – and he hated fire." She was babbling in her extremity. "Fire can hurt it."

"Are you sure?"

"I…" She took a deep breath. "This mist… it makes everything quiet as the grave. You can't even hear yourself die. But when Sam put a flaming arrow in his chest, he screamed. Like nothing I've ever heard before. It was the fire that hurt him, not the arrow; he was wounded in a dozen places and didn't seem to care, but as soon as he caught fire... If this creature and whatever it was that twisted Paulo are related, then fire will kill them both. I'd bet my life on it."

Klein's eyes narrowed. "You just did." He turned from her, shouting, "Tairn, belay that last order. Fetch the pitchbarrel! Get me a bucket and a quiver. And the Changeling!" A grin split his face, pale white teeth against sun-blistered mahogany skin."Fire. Fine, then. We'll set that bastard's whole world ablaze."


	7. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Neana's part in this was done, but she felt compelled to see it through. If the plan worked, she would only have to watch. If it failed, they were all dead, and she preferred to die on her feet with a sword in her hand. Either way, she waited impatiently.

She was impatient because the Bear, its sails reefed for maneuverability in the harbor, was as slow and awkward as watching turtles mate. The ship heeled and rolled in the most ungainly manner possible as sailors crawled across the deck, hastily preparing her for battle. She might have been a doughty and noble craft on the open sea, but in these shallow, crowded, refugee-filled waters she was forced to move at a crawl. With growing ire Neana watched them creep closer to the Kitten; because the monster was on the far side of the ship, they wouldn't have a clear shot until they passed her.

Neana fidgeted as she watched Captain ir'Arth singlehandedly hold back the abomination. Neana longed to be at her side. Ir'Arth was losing ground steadily, although she showed no physical wounds. She struck at the creature again and again, but her heavy, flanged mace merely passed through her insubstantial foe. The creature, for its part, seemed loathe to touch her; it wanted nothing to do with her godly aura. It was a standoff, almost. In the end, the monster was wearing the captain down through simple exhaustion; whatever it was made of, it was at least partially tangible, and after being smacked around by a mobile fog bank for ten minutes Alexia ir' Arth looked tired as hell.

In only minutes, the Mother Bear would come to her aid. Neana prayed that it would be fast enough.

The Bear's crew was making good use of the slow voyage. Two huge pitchbarrels had been dredged up from the hold. Usually the concentrated pine tar was used to caulk and waterproof the ship's hull during repairs. On the forecastle, Sam and her small squad of archers were busy dipping the heads of their arrows into the thick, viscous pulp. Behind them, sailors were manhandling a heavy wrought iron cauldron that had been pulled from the kitchen. Pitch would be scooped into the cauldron and set ablaze with a torch; the archers would dip the tips of their tar soaked arrows into the flame before launching them. Other crewmen stood nearby, nervously gripping buckets full of wet sand. In case any of the flammable pine tar prematurely caught fire, they might be able to douse it before it spread to consume the wooden ship.

It was almost time.

Neana fumbled at the heavy leather straps that girdled the spot where her breastplate ended and her chain skirt began. With clumsy metal fingers she found the tiny, secret pouch, and shook its contents into her palm. It was a pendant; a cheap copper chain fixed to the figure of a red, winged woman. Not many people would recognize it for what it was; many that did would instinctively distrust it and anyone carrying it. In the entire world, only Sam knew that she carried one.

Neana stroked it gently as she watched her Captain hold the line from afar. Captain ir'Arth would likely not approve of this, but every little bit helped. She pressed the pendant to her lips.

Neana whispered; not that she had a choice in the matter, but for the moment, she did not wish to be overheard. "My Goddess. Daughter of Arawai and the Lord of the Deep, born in anger and rape; I humbly call to thee. As one of the few who remember your true name, I ask your aid on behalf of another." Neana licked her lips; this part always made her nervous. "Szorawai. The Fury." She paused. Every time, she expected to feel a tingle at the god's true name, but there never was one. "There is a great enemy that needs killing. It is not of this world and has no part of your plan, and I want it dead. Feel my desire and know that I am your servant. Lend strength to our arms and hate to our hearts, so that we may butcher it, and I will dedicate its death to you. I have no sacrifice to offer you, but you have my promise; if it can feel pain, we will give it agony."

She looked around furtively, but no one was watching her. Every face was intent on the pitchbarrel, or the making of the fire arrows, or the epic battle going on aboard their sister ship. Every face was unique, but they all bore an emotion that Neana understood well.

"Though we may not all worship you openly," she continued, "all here know well your lesson of hate. Lend us the strength to survive the coming battle." She pressed her lips to the figurine and then placed it on her tongue. With a grimace she bit down, hard. The pendant was dull iron, and its spiky protrusions lacerated her mouth. She dropped the bloody woman back into the palm of her hand and stowed it away in its secret pouch.

She spat upon the deck. "There. Blood for my god." She studied her Captain. Was she standing taller? Was she fighting with renewed vigor? Were there two gods aiding her now instead of one? It was tough to say.

The Bear finally passed the prow of her sister ship. Those crewmen onboard the Kitten who weren't hiding in terror cheered as they passed. Captain Klein raised his fist. "Ready archers." A dozen arrows were knocked in unison.

The creature came into view, and the crew groaned. It was huge. From a distance, or standing on the ground, its true size hadn't been apparent. Now that it was splayed against the side of her ship, Neana realized the scope of the thing. Half of its bulk still lay spooled darkly on the wooden pier, but the other half had engulfed the mooring lines and was straddling fully half of the huge battleship's main deck. It was a pool of clotted shadow four times a man's height and twice as wide. Insofar as Neana could tell, it paid no attention to the approaching ship.

Captain Klein was unfazed. "Hard rudder to port. Ready pitch," he ordered. The archers clustered around the burning cauldron and stabbed their arrows into it. "Ready…" he stopped, and smiled. "I can't believe I'm saying this. Ready the barrel."

The biggest half-orc Neana had ever seen lifted the second pitchbarrel with ease and cradled it on his shoulder. He strode to the port side of the ship. Tarn, the Captain had called him. He had the air of a veteran petty officer, but wore the uniform of a midshipman; a rank usually assigned to cadets in training. Neana shrugged away her confusion. Tarn called out a couple of names and the next two largest sailors on the deck went to his side. They took a firm grip on the barrel.

The warship listed to starboard and its course altered to take it dangerously close to the pier. Neana leaned over the side until she was staring directly down upon the creature. On the forecastle, the archers did the same, aiming their arrows at its center.

"Throw the barrel," Klein ordered. With a massive heave, Tarn and his buddies threw the barrel as far away from the ship as it would go. It struck the monster's insubstantial bulk and went straight through it, smashing to splinters upon the planks of the wooden pier beneath. Neana stared into the abomination's dark core, imagining that she could see the mass of tar slowly, slowly oozing outwards in a puddle from the broken barrel.

Sam needed no tar-covered arrows; her magic bow was invested with splinters of dragonshard, each one imbued with the essence of elemental fire. Plain wooden arrows burst into flame as soon as they left her fingers. She plucked an arrow from her quiver and drew the bowstring back. Sam wasn't a naturally beautiful woman, but Neana saw a lovely grace in her now, in the tense lines of her body as she barely restrained seventy pounds of deadly force. Neana felt a twinge of emotion; a love that was pragmatic, if not romantic. Despite their differences, the Changeling and the Half-elf were alike in vocation; they both dealt in death. Neana may have favored steel and magic, but she had to admit that there was an artful beauty to Sam's mastery of the bow. There was something amazing in the way that she needed only move one muscle to unleash death.

Captain Klein rested his hands upon the railing. "Sam," he said. "Burn this bastard alive."

Sam moved one muscle.

Her aim was impeccable. A line of fire connected her bow and the pier. The arrow passed cleanly through the center of the creature. As with the barrel, the abomination's vaporous form offered the arrow no resistance but, to Neana's delight, the arrow's flaming corona had some effect. In its passage the creature's substance burned with an eerie green flame, like swamp gas. Then the arrow struck the pitch, and the pier became a ball of fire.

Tar doesn't burn explosively, but it does burn hot. The old and rotted timbers of the pier, sodden with decades of seawater, nevertheless burst into flame instantly under the boiling tar. The base of the creature became a sheet of flames. The fire quickly spread to the monster itself, and soon the orange flames of the wood were joined by the thick, noxious, blue tinged fires of burning magic. The creature recoiled, swirling and beating at the flames with its extruded appendages. Denied a mouth, it could not scream, but Neana could read agony into its motions.

She smiled. Good. Let it burn.

The rest of Sam's archers launched their arrows, while the Changeling threw shaft after shaft at it with chilling speed and efficiency. The creature rolled and twisted and turned in upon itself, losing all sense of form. Now it resembled a great, smoky bonfire caught in the center of a whirlwind. All its efforts only served to fan the flames. Neana began to giggle quietly.

There were cheers and roars from the crews of both ships, as they egged on the death of their foe. Theyt turned to gasps when the monster hurled its bulk off the pier. Two of the ship's mooring lines had already snapped as the rope frayed and caught fire, but it drew itself up the rest with appalling speed. Captain Alexia hesitated, not certain whether to throw herself out of the way or confront the rushing conflagration, but before she could move it engulfed her. It rolled over her like a fiery storm cloud, and when it passed it left her lying on her knees, choking and covered in burning soot.

Moving in a blind panic, the monster reached the base of the Kitten's main-mast and began to climb. It surged up the mast, ignoring the lines and spars in its mad dash to escape the fire that consumed it. Sails and cordage burst into flame around it. When it reached the topmast it could go no higher; whatever it was, it could not fly. Roiling in fury, it began to swirl and convulse; in its death throes, it looked like the tip of the Kitten's mast was crowned in a fiery tornado.

"It'll crack the mast!" Klein called in horror. And it was true; Neana heard the the sound ever sailor dreads, the pop and snap of smashing wood. No part of the ship had been designed to survive an inferno. There was a loud crack, followed by a full third of the ship's middle mast snapping off and falling into the sea. It dragged a tangled mess of burning spars and ropes, into the drink with it. The mast passed within a yard of the Mother Bear'sstern.

The mast section was still tied to the ship; it dragger her down like an anchor. The Kitten listed hard to starboard and the rest of her mooring lines gave way. Her crew burst forth out of the lower decks to drag their Captain to safety and to chop and saw at the remaining lines. If they were lucky, they would free the broken section of mast before it rolled the ship over. Neana should have been watching them. Part of her desperately wanted to go and help them, but something else made her turn away. She needed to witness the creature's death.

It hovered over the surface of the water like a cup of lamp oil poured over a bucket. It was still burning, and trying pathetically to extinguish itself. It was small now, barely larger than a horse; the fire was consuming it utterly. Soon it would be gone, or dead, or whatever happened to abominations against nature. Good. Fucking beautiful. She wished that it had a heart so she could rip it out. It had uncovered the screaming child inside her, and for that it deserved to die a thousand times in boiling agony, not just once.

She giggled and watched.

When it was finally consumed, she looked away and into the face of Captain Klein. He must have approached her while she was preoccupied. He frowned, and said, "Are you always this creepy?"

"I have my days," she rasped. Then, very gently, she fell over. Exhaustion took her before she hit the ground.


	8. Epilogue

Epilogue.

Something was poking Neana in the side. It turned out to be Sam's bony finger, jabbing at her like a bored four year old.

"Are you awake?" Sam asked.

"Are you trying to lose a finger?" Neana snarled, and stopped. She was shocked. Sam looked terrible; her face and uniform were covered in soot and her eyes had a sunken, haunted look. She lips, always colorless, now looked like bleached bone.

Sam retracted her finger and hung her head. "Sorry."

Neana sat up, and only then realized she was lying on a rickety cot. To her right and left, stretching from wall to wall, were two dozen other makeshift beds, many no more than a few padded blankets. Many of their occupants wore bandages, or groaned softly, or simply laid so still they may have been corpses. From the thin yellow light streaming in through the ceiling planks she guessed that she was somewhere in the lower deck, probably a cargo hold.

Neana yawned and cracked her knuckles. She felt surprisingly good. "I… How long was I asleep?" she asked.

A pretty, tanned young woman in a simple brown robe answered her question. "You were asleep for more than half a day. Considering your exhaustion, I thought it best to let your body set its own clock." The woman – Kiana, she remembered, the ship's chaplain – placed a hand on Neana's forehead. "It's a miracle that you've recovered this soon. I thought you would sleep for days, but if you awoke on your own time," she glanced at Sam, who looked carefully innocent, "then I guess it's alright for you to move about. I could certainly use the bed."

"A miracle," Neana whispered. She eyed the fat bronze octagon that hung from Kiana's neck on a chain, the symbol of the goddess Arawai.

Kiana gently touched her medallion, and smiled. Apparently, she interpreted Neana's hesitation as some kind of superstitious piety. "While Arawai may grant me the healing touch from time to time, no, Neana, I didn't have to use it on you. When I saw that your state was caused by a lack of energy and not by a mortal wound, I saved my own energy for those… less fortunate."

Neana studied the other wounded. They looked wretched. Few wore any uniform that she could see. "Where did they come from?"

"Seaside," Sam answered. She let her hair cover her face as she studied her soot encrusted hands. She didn't seem to want to meet anyone's eyes. "After the battle, we started pulling people out of the water. When we ran out of room on the deck, we started putting them onto other boats." Sam looked up. "We weren't the last ones out of the fog, Neana. They've been popping up at the edge of the town in handfuls all night long. Half of them are torn up pretty bad; some of 'em were just about gutted. They say that there are things in the mist even worse than the one we fought. Things with teeth." She shivered. "We haven't seen a survivor since early this morning. They must have finished them all off."

Kiana put a supportive hand on Sam's shoulder. "Why don't you get some sleep, Lieutenant. You've been attending to the wounded all night. We could all use a rest."

"Can't," Sam replied. She nodded at Neana. "Captain wants me to bring you to him."

Neana began to stand up before she realized that she could feel a draft. She was wearing a silk shift, and nothing else.

"It's one of mine," Sam explained. "We stowed your armor in the hold, and you weren't… uh… wearing anything underneath it but a gambeson, and your clothes are back on the Dire Kitten, so…"

"I'm not going anywhere in your nightie," Neana said.

Sam held up a brown knapsack. "I had Chandrasitar bring over some of your personal effects when she rowed over. There's a change of clothes in here."

"Chandra is here?"

Sam nodded. "She rowed over this morning. We'll talk about it after you get dressed."

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Neana stepped carefully over a moaning woman. The main deck was as crowded with civilians as the cargo deck was. Neana had to tread very carefully on the slippery floor, because Chandrasitar hadn't thought to bring an extra pair of boots. Her pink toes wiggled in a puddle: she hoped it was water, and not piss or something worse. Many of the civilians were wounded, seasick, or just too mentally scarred to take care of themselves.

"How many?" she asked.

"A lot," Sam sighed. "A quarter of the crew are missing, we think. It's hard to tell. Half the ­Kitten's crew ended up here, and half of our lot are on you ship. And Seaside… we'll never know how many of them didn't make it out."

"And Captain ir'Arth?"

"She's alive, thank the Host. Or thank the Flame, I guess. Whatever. She looked pretty bad, but it was mostly superficial. It'll be a while before her hair grows back, but she's conscious, and giving orders. She and Captain Klein had a palaver while you were under."

Neana exhaled a fearful breath. "Good. What about the others?"

"Jaken is the only officer we lost. We thought your First Bow and your bos'un were goners too, but Lt. Katra and Ensign Moira came out of the mist just before midnight. Poor Katra's pretty bad – it looks like something took a bite out of her leg – but she's healing. Kiana went over to see to your wounded last night." Sam smiled. "She said Moira wouldn't stop asking after you."

Neana smiled, one of her rare genuine displays of pleasure. "Good." She liked Moira. The shy shifter, along with Sam and possibly Captain ir'Arth, were the only people she considered friends.

They found Klein on the Forecastle. He had dragged a folding table up there and was busy studying a sheaf of maps. He didn't glance up as they approached, but said, "Lieutenants."

"Sir," they saluted.

He scrawled something on the back of what looked like a cargo manifest and held it up. "Sam, run this over to Tarn and tell him to have someone row it over to the Kitten. We need to get this crew situation sorted out. I don't like being surrounded by people I don't recognize." He looked up at her and worry creased his face. "And after that, report to your bunk. Take a nap. You look like the dog's breakfast."

"Yes, Boss," she smiled dully and trotted off.

Klein turned back to his notes and maps while Neana stood patiently at attention. Time passed. Her bare feet began to ache. After a while, she coughed pointedly.

"Why the hell are you still standing, Lieutenant?" Klein pointed to one of the barrels arranged around the table. "Take a chair." Neana, irritated, sat down. With deliberate care, the Captain pulled up a square of blotting paper and laid it neatly onto his parchment. He removed it and studied the results. No smears. "I'm not ignoring you, Mrs. Tacey, I'm calculating provisions. We have one hundred and sixty seven officers, seamen, and marines to feed, as well as over three hundred refugees. Somewhere, I have to find food and water for them all. Frankly, it'll take a bigger miracle than that spectacle last night to pull it off."

"No disrespect was meant, sir."

He put down his quill and looked at her. Neana was shocked. Like Sam, he was worn and haggard. His one eye stared out of its socket as if from the depths of a well. Neana wasn't good with human ages, but he looked as if he had aged a decade in one night. "I don't know how Alexia runs her ship, but here we don't stand on formality. Not for the officers, at least. You don't need to end every sentence with 'sir', and you can call me Klein or Captain. My First Bow, for reasons known only to herself, calls me Boss." He grinned: a bright, feral smile. "Some of the men, when they think I'm not listening, refer to me as 'Mother', but somehow I don't think the second word is 'Bear'."

"Uh… yes, Captain Klein."

"And I'm sure as hell not going to keep calling you Mrs. Tacey." He wiped a hand across his brow. "A lot happened while you were asleep, Neana. I'm not sure where to begin, so I'll take it in the order it occurred. Now, you probably know that both Alexia and I have… certain methods of contacting our superiors in order to send reports and receive orders, even over great distances. For reasons of national secrecy, we've always kept the exact nature of these methods secret." He laughed bitterly. "I guess it doesn't matter now. " Klein mused in silence for a moment. "A few hours after the attack, after I'd finally managed to kick enough asses to start things moving, I tried to send a report in. It didn't work."

Captain Klein removed a fist sized object from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. It was a smooth, lusterless purple stone. Neana picked it up and studied it. Closing her eyes, she probed it with her fingertips, tasting for magic. She felt a faint listless echo. "A whisper stone. It's used up," she said, and dropped it on the table.

Klein nodded. "Only works a couple of times before it needs to recharge. Normally, I pick it up, say the name and rank of the person I need to speak to, and it glows. Then I make my report real fast, before it goes dark. After that, I wait. This time, it didn't glow, no matter whose name I said." He picked up the stone and flipped it over, showing her the glyph carved in the bottom. "House Sivis. This little bauble has an effective range of five hundred miles, or so I was informed. If it isn't broken, that means that there isn't a functioning House Sivis outpost within five hundred miles."

"That's impossible," Neana said. "The city of Making is only a couple hundred miles away. Sivis has a chapterhouse there. You can't set your drink down without accidentally using a gnomish scribe for a coaster in Making."

"Indeed." Klein pocketed the stone. "Well, that got me curious, so we tried other methods. Alexia and I got your friend Chandra to use her…" He tapped his forehead, "mind tricks. Telepathy. You know how she does. She put herself in deep meditation and tried to make contact with Admiral Stark in Metrol. He's our operations leader; if something has happened to him, it's happened to the whole command corps."

Neana shivered. She remembered what Chandra's "contact" could feel like. She pushed an image of writhing worms out of her imagination. "Did she find him?"

"We're not sure. Her eyes rolled back in her head, she pitched over screaming, and then she blacked out for an hour. So I'm guessing not."

"Is she all right?"

"She's up and about. And complaining about her accommodations. You could call that back to normal, I suppose. But she refuses to talk about what happened. Says it was 'indescribable'. When we told her to try again, she refused. It took mine and ir'Arth's direct orders plus the threat of court-martial to get her to say yes, and even then only if we agreed that she could try to contact someone else instead. This time, we tried to get in touch with Admiral ir'Matast's Northern Fleet. And we were successful."

"Good," Neana breathed. She stared past the Captain, into the remnants of Seaside. The town was still covered by a sheet of thick gray fog. Piers jutted out from the mists like bony fingers reaching into the sea. It stretched to the edge of the land in either direction; in the shallow crescent of the harbor, Neana felt encircled by the fog. She had begun to fear that the entire world was now covered by the mists. "She's okay?"

"If you call the middle of the siege of Flamekeep okay. She's alive, at any rate." He paused. "Neana, she already knew about the mists. She said they rolled up on her east flank last night, covered the entire bank of the Brey River. When the refugees started streaming out of the mist, she sent a cutter scouting in each direction, to see how far along the river it stretched."

"How far?" Neana felt something tighten inside her guts. She knew the answer already.

"One of them made it almost to Lake Brey before the fog let up. The other stopped reporting back. Neana…" Captain Klein put both palms flat on the table. "The mists stretch from coast to coast, north to south. We don't know about the eastern border yet, not for certain, but if Chandra can't reach Admiral Stark, it must have spread at least as far east as Metrol. That's less than a hundred miles from the border. We have to act under the assumption that the mists cover the entire nation of Cyre."

Neana's mouth fell open. No words came out.

Klein nodded wearily, and she suddenly recognized the look in his eyes. Defeat. "Cyre is gone."

Neana tried to wrap her head around it, but it was too big. Nations did not just disappear, especially not one of the Five. Klein's words sat in her head like a mountain of dread, and she pondered them numbly. Gone. She tried to find a perspective where they made sense. _Cyre was gone._ Too big. A nation was an abstract idea, lines on a map. _Her village was gone._ Well, that had been effectively destroyed decades ago by the elves. _The orphanage where she grew up was gone._ No luck there, she barely had any feelings at all for that miserable hole.

Metrol was gone. Whitehearth was gone. Tronish and Making and Lorne and Eston were gone. House Cannith and its great Creation Forges were gone. The Imperial Cyran Academy of Magic was gone, along with every wizard she had ever been apprenticed to and every student she had ever studied with. Brunin Dorak, the old dwarven man-at-arms who had taught her swordfighting for a silver a day, was gone. The girl who had been her first kiss was gone. The secret shrine to the Fury underneath the ale house in Kalazart, where the faithful left little sacrifices of gold and incense, was gone. The coffee house where she had first met Sam was gone. The bookstore in Jarp, where the owner always set aside a volume of the newest mystery stories from Breland because he knew she liked them, was gone.

All gone.

"Are you sure?" she demanded. "There could be survivors inside. The mists might not have completely covered the interior…"

"Perhaps," he replied. "But if they're inside the mists, we can't reach them. Admiral ir'Matast has already made several attempts to scout the interior of the mist. Her search parties all failed to return. Her wizards' attempts at scrying showed nothing but that damn grey fog no matter where they looked."

He grasped her shoulder. It might have been an attempt at comfort. "Look, I'd like to hope it isn't true as much as anyone, but we have to operate as if Cyre is gone. Because if it's true," he swept an arm to indicate the small fleet of salvaged ships that had managed to escape the docks of Seaside, "then this, along with Admiral ir'Matast's fleet, may be all that's left of Cyre."

Neana shook her head. It was still too big. She had a feeling that it might always be too big; that she might never really understand what had happened last night. It would take weeks to accept, and years to sink in.

"The Admiral has ordered us to rendezvous with her fleet," Klein continued. "She's withdrawing the siege and decamping at Throneport. It's still neutral territory, and we hope that the Throne Wardens will grant us sanctuary until we figure out what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, half the continent lies between us and the Northern Fleet, and the Dire Kitten is going to be half-crippled until we fix that mast. I can't wait on her; I've got a few hundred refugees to look after, and they'll be starving if I can't get them to civilization soon."

Klein shoved a stack of papers out of the way and gestured towards a huge map of the continent. "I have two options. I've already made up my mind on one, but I'd like a third opinion." He pointed. "To get to Thronehold, I'm going to have to circumnavigate half the continent. The western route is five hundred miles longer, and takes us past the Demon Wastes and the damn goblins, not to mention Breland and Aundair, who, as far as I know, we're still at war with. We won't find any friendly ports until we hit the Shadow Marches, two thousand miles away. The alternative; the eastern route takes us through Valenar's seas," Neana's fingers clenched involuntarily, "to Q'barra, which is as friendly a port as we're like to find. I should be able to drop the civilian fleet off there. Past Q'barra is Lhazaar, where we might meet some disorganized pirate resistance, but I doubt it. Then, if we can make it past Karnath, we'll be safe."

"What about the Kitten?" Neana asked. "Where will we be?"

"Captain ir'Arth will stay here, at Seaside, until she gets her ship fixed. We have the materials to make repairs, just not the time. We've talked it over, and if she can cannibalize the harbor's wooden loading towers to make a pulley system, she ought to be able to patch it together in a few days. In the meantime, the Bear will lead the civilian ships east, into Valenar waters. We'll be slowed down by the civilian ships, so Alexia should be able to catch up with us after her ship is repaired. If everything goes as planned, she'll meet us at the southern tip of Valenar, assuming that it isn't also covered by these damned mists. Then we'll sail to Q'barra, and damn any elves that get in our way."

Neana nodded slowly. "It might work. If we can really get the Kitten repaired that quickly, both ships together should be able to punch through any _Valaes Tairn_ resistance. The elves have a shitty navy, despite all their fancy swords. We'll probably make it."

"I'm glad you think so, because you'll be leading the charge."

"Sir?"

"You're coming with me," Klein explained. "My arcanist is dead, and I need someone who knows a spell from a hole in the ground, in case we run into any more of these damned mist creatures. Alexia might know about this magical crap, but I don't. I could also use another sword arm." When Neana started to protest, he cut her off. "That wasn't a request, Lieutenant. Besides, I would have thought you'd be eager for the first crack at any elves we run across, from your reputation. You'll get plenty of fight, where we're going. If the elves haven't been massacred by the fog, they've just woken up to discover that their western border has been replaced by a gaping pit to hell. They'll be buzzing like hornets."

Neana considered. A sick smile twisted her face. "Yes, Sir."

"Good. I'm also stealing Alexia's navigator, Chandra, to keep you company. I need someone who can read a map, and, more importantly, I need someone who can keep me in touch with the Admiral if the situation changes."

"You're stripping the Kitten to the bone, Sir," Neana protested. "No First Sword, no Kalashtar witchcraft, and she lost a lot of marines. What if she gets attacked before she meets up with the rest of us?"

"I know," he replied. "I know. But I need to bring my full strength to bear in the front. Alexia agrees with me. We have a lot of civilians to defend." He sighed. "It's done. Go fetch your belongings and say your goodbyes, Lieutenant. After that, you'll want to reconnoiter with my First Sword and hammer out your duties. You've met him before; his name's Razze. He's a half elf, like you." The corner of Klein's mouth twitched. "I'm sure you'll have a lot in common."

"Sir?"

"Technically, you outrank him due to seniority, but since this is his ship and these are his men, that probably wouldn't be a smart point to press. I'm sure you'll work out a compromise."

"Yes, Sir." Neana said darkly. This was shaping up to be a perpetual headache. "Permission to go, Sir?"

"Yes. No, wait. One last thing." Klein had already begun poring over his papers again, scribbling notes. He didn't look at her. "With two extra officers on board, we're going to be tight for space. And since propriety forbids you bunk with Razze or Tarn, and we can't have officers down with the crew, both you and Chandra will have to share a room with one of my people. I'm putting Lt. Chandra with Ensign Kiana, because my chaplain is a selfless, patient, god fearing woman who should be able to tolerate one insufferable Kalashtar. That puts you with my Changeling. Do you have any objections to bunking with Sam?"

"Sir?" His voice betrayed nothing, his stance betrayed nothing. He wasn't even smiling. Nothing marked this as anything but the most honest and innocent of questions. Nevertheless… "You knew?"

"I know everything, Mrs. Tacey." He didn't so much as glance at her. "It's why I get to wear the big hat."

"How long have you..?"

"Since the beginning. And then I tried very hard to un-know it. Military relationships and officer fraternization are a nightmare on morale. It breaks the chain of command and fills the average enlisted man's mind with improper notions. Especially when it's two female officers doing… whatever a Changeling and a Half-elf do together; I'm sure I don't want to know. If I knew about it, I'd have to take action." He focused his one good eye upon her. "I'm saying this once, and then we're going to ignore it forever, do you understand me? It's not my problem unless you make it my problem. If it becomes my problem, we get to have a whole other conversation. A much nastier one."

"Yes, Sir," Neana rasped weakly.

"Good."

"I'll just… go fetch my things, then."

"Give my regards to Captain ir'Arth, Lieutenant."

"Yes… Captain Klein."

She left. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard him shout for her. She trudged back over to the table. "Sir?"

"I almost forgot to ask," he replied. He settled back into his folding campaign chair, and looked her up and down. "Did you have family in Cyre?"

"No Sir," she said flatly. "My parents died when I was very young."

He nodded absently. "Well, Sam did. You knew that?" She nodded. She had, and had forgotten. "They were close, I think. She doesn't handle grief well. You… seem to be much more acquainted with it. Here's my request: don't let my First Bow go to pieces on me."

"I'm not very good at comforting, Sir." she protested.

"Do your best. I need every one of my people. They're irreplaceable, especially now."

Neana's mouth was suddenly dry. That made it hit home, somehow. "I'll… see what I can do."

As she made the long walk across the deck, she felt a tiny piece of the mountain of dread break off, and sink into the depths. Every piece made it more manageable, but it also made the grief more vivid. Cyre was gone. A whole nation had been orphaned. She looked at the refugees littering the deck and the seamen going about their duties mechanically as their minds were elsewhere. She saw the same deadened look on every face. They were going through the motions of their jobs, because it was easier than doing nothing.

They had been cut loose from the world. Nothing would ever be the same again.


End file.
